Ronald McNair

Ronald Erwin McNair was born on the twenty-first of October 1950 in Lake City, South Carolina, one of the sons of Carl McNair, an auto-body repairman, and Pearl Montgomery McNair, a teacher. Raised in a segregated Southern town in a home of modest means, the boy showed an early and stubborn brilliance. He graduated as valedictorian of Carver High School in 1967 and carried that promise north and west across a nation that had not yet made room for him.

He earned a bachelor's degree in physics, magna cum laude, from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1971, then completed a doctorate in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. He became a nationally recognized expert in laser physics, joining the Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. He was also a gifted saxophonist and an accomplished karate black belt, a man who pursued excellence in every room he entered.

In 1978 NASA chose McNair from thousands of applicants for its astronaut corps. Aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-41-B, from the third to the eleventh of February 1984, he became the second African American to fly in space. On the twenty-eighth of January 1986, he returned to Challenger as a mission specialist on STS-51-L. Seventy-three seconds after liftoff the shuttle broke apart, and McNair, aged thirty-five, died with his six crewmates.

He left behind a family and a name now carried by scholarship programs, schools, and libraries that lift first-generation students toward the doctorate he earned. Ronald McNair reached for the stars and became one; may his light guide those who follow.